New Yorkers have experienced their fair share of unusual events recently. There was an earthquake, an eclipse and the criminal trial of a former president of the United States, all against the backdrop of nail-biting national political crises and the hottest year on record.
On Tuesday, the city added what seemed like a cosmic freak to the list: a meteorite that had traveled millions of miles through deep space entered the atmosphere, passed over the Statue of Liberty, zoomed over the harbor’s tourist boats of New York. on the Midtown Manhattan skyline and exploded very, very high up in the area.
In a chaotic week, many New Yorkers didn’t seem to notice. Or, if they heard a strange noise, they did what New Yorkers often do, especially when in midtown Manhattan. They had their own business.
“I heard that, yes, I did,” Pat Battle, local NBC News anchor, he told viewers on Tuesday, with a question in her voice. “But I never thought to look up.”
The arrival and rapid demise of a meteor over Midtown, the city’s noisiest and most chaotic precinct, drew little attention there Tuesday. However, some residents in other counties and in New Jersey complained of a loud explosion late Tuesday morning or said they saw a fireball in the sky.
Ashleigh Holmes, a spokeswoman for New York’s Emergency Management, referred questions about the meteorite to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
NASA’s Meteor Watch said that, based on initial information, He believed the meteor was first spotted when it was about 49 miles above New York Harbor, east of Greenville Yard, a railroad yard in Jersey City. The object then flew over the Statue of Liberty before disintegrating about 29 miles above Midtown.
It’s unclear how often this happens in the New York area, in part because NASA doesn’t track every small meteorite that approaches the planet or enters the atmosphere.
Some staunch New Yorkers picked it all up. But others, struck by the city’s series of horrific events and the dark national mood, couldn’t help but see a disturbing foreshadowing in New York’s brush with the universe. Even if the meteorite was about the size of a toaster.
“You’d think that’s a sign,” said Charlotte Alberts, 26, as she walked her dogs in her neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Something is brewing.”
When the city was rocked by a small earthquake in April, Ms. Alberts said she initially mistook the jolt for a panic attack. On Tuesday, she cast her eyes on the East River in the sky above the Manhattan skyline.
“This is really crazy,” he muttered.
But elsewhere in Williamsburg, Bryant Grisham, 21, a visitor from Athens, Ala., said he thought there was no reason to read the movements of planets, meteors and metropolises. It was all just a matter of luck.
“It’s very random,” he said. Especially for New York.
And some found the idea of a meteor exploding over Midtown strangely calming.
Abdul Ndadi, 40, a science fiction writer in the Bronx, said that with so much man-made suffering in the world, the meteor’s brief appearance seemed like a reassuring act of nature.
“At least one meteorite is normal,” said Mr Ndadi.
NASA said the meteorite never really posed a danger to anyone on the ground because it was small. So small, in fact, that it would be impossible to see it coming in the first place.
In a Facebook post, the agency said it monitors “asteroids that are capable of endangering us Earthlings, but small rocks like the one producing this fireball are only about a foot in diameter, unable to survive to the ground.”
“We don’t (actually can’t) track things this small at significant distances from Earth,” the agency said. “So the only time we know about them is when they hit the atmosphere and create a meteor or a fireball.”
NASA said it was able to make “a very rough determination of the meteor’s trajectory” based on reports from people who claimed to have seen a fireball or heard an explosion. He also noted that there had been some military activity in the area around the same time, which may also explain the noise.
The agency said it believed the space rock was traveling at about 38,000 miles per hour when it passed over New York. But he warned that his understanding of the event remained “very crude and uncertain”, and his statements about the meteor’s path changed throughout the day.
The idea of a meteor traveling across the galaxy to make its way to New York City struck some people as a moment of wonder.
Tina Dang, 43, a private chef, wiped a tear from her eye as she spoke of “a small miracle” in a turbulent time.
“There’s something magical about it,” he said. “You forget about these incredible moments in life when there’s so much else going on.”
